Influencing People Without Making Friends

The funny thing is I can see Jagi Lamplighter recognizing Sword & Flower as a different type of superversive than Anthony is trying to make it. (Anthony is misreading genre and beats here. Sword & Flower is not the type of story he wants it to be.) Which to me highlights the problem Superversive has. Like symbolism, it exists, but in recognition, it usually reveals more about the what the reviewer sees in the text than the text itself. And when fundamentally and intentionally subversive works are held up as superversive, it makes me wonder if superversive is not short for “I like it.”

I've held back in my criticism because, while I am not a Superversive, I have respect for the idea, and many Superversives are writers and critics I hold in high esteem. I do not enjoy the fact that my first interaction with Tom Simon was oppositional, for instance. However, I have seen a difference in aim and deed that makes it difficult to sign on with that crowd.

Since writing the quoted post in a private group since made public, I have read a detailed ideal of the Superversive, and, barring a minor point or two, I agree with the list as an aim all writers should consider:

Heroes who are actually heroic. They don’t have to be heroic all of the time, or even most of the time. But when the time comes, they must actually be heroic.

People are basically good. Not all the time, not in every case – and certainly not every person. But basically.

Good Wins. Not every time – a good story always has setbacks in it. But evil winning is most definitely not superversive.

True love is real. Again, maybe not for everybody. But it’s real.

Beauty is real. It’s ok to show the warts. But show the beauty, too.

The transcendent is awesome. There’s no obligation to show any particular religion, or even really religion at all. But superversive literature should show the glory and splendor of the wider universe around us, and it should leave us in awe of it.

Family is good and important. Not every family, sure. But those are the exceptions, not the rule.

Civilization is better than barbarism. This doesn’t mean barbarians are evil, or that they aren’t fun. But in the end, they’re… well, barbaric.

Strength, courage, honor, beauty, truth, sacrifice, spirituality, and humility are virtues. This can be demonstrated by showing people breaking the virtues. But they must be recognized as virtues.

There is hope. Superversive stories should never leave the reader feeling despair.

Again, these are high ideals, most of which are missing from the writing of today's science fiction and fantasy. And, given that there are more Superversive writers than pulp rev writers, I wish them success. Transforming the current landscape requires writers, and there is nothing in the Superversive standard that clashes with Misha Burnett's idea of pulp or my own. Their success would make more stories that I want to read.

But now it's time to explain my bone with them. Since the birth of the movement, I have seen Superversive writers and critics hold up previous works of deliberate Subversion as examples for today's writers to emulate. Superversive writers have dug their heels in to defend the Campbellian Revolution from criticism, despite the fact that Campbell's reign was the Golden Age of Subversion and a Golden Age of Despair. And the Superversive collection Forbidden Thoughts was unironically tailored after Dangerous Visions, an unapologetic work of Subversion with a capital "S". It is this hypocrisy that mars the otherwise appealing Superversive movement. At the very least, the standards of Superversion do not appear to be applied rigorously in the critical sense at the present, and not at all when nostalgia is invoked. At worst, the current standard of Superversive is fundamentally flawed, and unable to distinguish between subversion and superversion. So, as it lacks any observable consistency in the critical sphere, I again wonder if superversive is nothing more than shorthand for “I like it.”

7 comments:

Basically, you're saying your big beef with superversion is that sometimes you disagree with us.

I'm a "Defender" of the Campbellian revolution sort of kind of, but I don't think Asimov - who I'm a fan of - is superversive. Quite the contrary. Nor Heinlein. I just like reading them.

And I simply know writers who write superversive Campbellian sci-fi, or at least, most writers would probably class it that way. EJ Shumak's "God, Robot" tale "Infinite Search", which was one of the volume's most praised stories, comes to mind. I wrote "Modified", which was deliberately Asimovian in style and deliberately superversive.

Superversive hard SF is of course John C. Wright's forte, and it's one of the reasons I simply can't take the claim that hard SF is inherently not-superversive seriously (nobody said that directly, but I'm trying to get at what you're driving at here). "The Martian" is both diamond-hard SF and very superversive.

And the Superversive collection Forbidden Thoughts was unironically tailored after Dangerous Visions, an unapologetic work of Subversion with a capital "S"

Let's just say there is quite a lot more going on behind the scenes there than you might think. There was enough objection to "Forbidden Thoughts" being published under the superversive banner (I was one of the big objectors, by the way) that we're considering starting a separate imprint for these sort of fist to the face publications.

But trust me, we've considered your objection there and addressed it.

What work can you recall that a superversive writer has directly argued was superversive that you are convinced was subversive?

The closest I can think of is "Futurama", which I defended on superversive grounds once, but I'll easily cop to my defense hinging only on certain, specific episodes.

Ohterwise I'm having trouble thinking of examples.

But besides that - I do want to point something out here.

Unlike the pulp rev guys, the superversives actually have stated criteria that we can use to mark off what is and isn't superversive.

I have been told multiple times that you can't do this with pulp works. You just "know".

Yet somehow this doesn't disqualify pulp. But because we sometimes disagree on exactly how to apply our much more specific standards, it's a useless critical framework?

That's hardly fair.

I submit that it's pretty obvious superversive as a phenomenon opposite to subversion exists; that we sometimes disagree about whether or not a work has that quality is hardly proof that there's nothing useful to talk about there.

"Unlike the pulp rev guys, the superversives actually have stated criteria that we can use to mark off what is and isn't superversive."

I guess I know who isn't reading my posts at Castalia House, then. Because I did make that attempt because Misha's criteria wasn't matching up with the pulps I was reading.

http://www.castaliahouse.com/a-recipe-for-pulp-fiction/

As for the rest, I am not arguing that superversive doesn't exist, but that superversive lacks historical reference in identifying the subversive works of the past. Because of that, works of deliberate subversion have been championed as a good to be emulated. (Some of Jagi's comments on message fic during the Puppy wars come to mind. Finding those in the reams of digital ink spilled, alas, is like finding a needle in a haystack.)

Superversive has a literal base. You'll find several different definitions of superversive, but we have a "canon", so to speak: Tom Simon's original Superversive essay, L. Jagi Lamplighter's "Holy Godzilla of the Apocalypse!", and most recently Corey Mcleery finally "officially" naming and defining the five categories of basic superversion, which I attempted to use in my comparison of "Sword and Flower" and "Daredevil".

You'll see a "development of doctrine" there; Tom Simon doesn't mention specific categories, and the categories Jagi uses in her post aren't the same as the ones Corey uses.

If you want to know the "official" way to judge what is and isn't superversive, the answer is to use Corey's post. It's the most recent, and we - together - developed those categories basically after analyzing and teasing them out from the books in the Superversive book list, recommended to us by readers. It was the first time a group effort was made to try and figure out the specific things that went into the creation of a superversive book; that is what we came up with.

But Corey's post isn't a repudiation of Jagi's, anymore than Jagi's is a repudiation of Tom's. As I pointed out, I was able to use the standards set in Jagi's post to mark "Daredevil" as superversive long before Corey even joined our group. Her post isn't "wrong", we've just managed to distill things down even more clearly. Where Tom Simon wrote about the basis of the theory, Jagi tried to come up with categories for it. Corey's post is the same thing, except it was a more scientific effort, and a group effort, this time around.

Now let's go to pulp. There are a billion and one different definitions out there of what pulp supposedly is or isn't, and yet if I said "Pulp is just another way of saying it's stuff you're a fan of", I'd spark another 100 comment post. Because it's not true; there is clearly a difference between pulp and not-pulp. That the pulp guys argue and don't agree on everything all the time is hardly proof that pulp is a useless critical framework.

And yet comparatively the pulp framework is MUCH more vaguely defined than the superversive framework!

The fact that we disagree sometimes on whether or not a work is superversive doesn't make those categories or that critical framework worthless. All it does it make it a discussion.

(Don't feel too bad about arguing with us, by the way. If you go back a bit in John C. Wright's archives he has an epic, I believe, four post series with hundreds of comments per post all in response to a disagreement I had with him regarding the nature of government. The threads contained some of the most angry, biting, brutal jabs you'll ever see. Vicious stuff.

So I invited John into "God, Robot" not long after that, and naturally he accepted the invitation.)

Both groups are developing their arguments. Except on what appears to be deliberate contradiction, my comments are intended to help tighten up the shot group. I still think Superversive is focused primarily on character and positive example and hasn't yet considered the power of the negative example of cautionary tales. That said, it is engaged in a moral dimension that Pulp Rev is not. In fact, many of us have yet to look into the seedier and sensationalist side of pulp such as weird menace, the cleaning up of which inflicted several of the morality codes onto various media. Yet Superversive+Pulp existed before, in Doc Savage and the Shadow.

What I expect to happen, though, is that Superversive and Pulp Rev eventually recreate the slick/pulp division seen in the first half of the 20th century.

Except on what appears to be deliberate contradiction, my comments are intended to help tighten up the shot group. I still think Superversive is focused primarily on character and positive example and hasn't yet considered the power of the negative example of cautionary tales.

This is like saying that the pulps haven't considered the power of new wave fiction. It's not that we're denying that it exists or even that there's valuable stuff there, it's just not what superversive fiction is.

At any rate, behind the scenes there is some debate going on about whether or not, say, "Brave New World" can be considered superversive because it's a warning of what a world without superversion would turn into. I don't think so; some disagree. It's a process.